"When philosophy paints its grey in grey then has a shape of life grown old. By philosophy's grey in grey it cannot be rejuvenated but only understood. The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of dusk." -- G.W.F. Hegel, 'Preface', Philosophy of Right.

"Philosophical self-reflection assures itself of the non-conceptual in the concept. Otherwise this latter would be, after Kant?s dictum, null, ultimately no longer the concept of something and thereby void. The philosophy which recognizes this, which cancels out the autarky of the concept, strikes the blinders from the eyes.."

"No theory escapes the market anymore: each one is offered as a possibility among competing opinions, all are made available, all snapped up. Thought need no more put blinders on itself, in the self-justifying conviction that one?s own theory is exempt from this fate, which degenerates into narcissistic self-promotion, than dialectics need fall silent before such a reproach and the one linked to it, concerning its superfluity and randomness as a slapdash method. Its name says to begin with nothing more than that objects do not vanish into their concept, that these end up in contradiction with the received norm of the adaequatio."

-"Philosophy has, at this historical moment, its true interest in what Hegel, in accordance with tradition, proclaimed his disinterest: in the non-conceptual, the individual and the particular; in what, ever since Plato, has been dismissed as transient and inconsequential and which Hegel stamped with the label of lazy existence.

"In sharp contrast to the usual scientific ideal, the objectivity of dialectical cognition needs more subject, not less. Otherwise philosophical experience shrivels. But the positivistic spirit of the epoch is allergic to this."

"Rationality itself is to an increasing extent equated more mathematico [Latin: in mathematical terms] with the capability of quantification. As much as this took into account the primacy of the triumphant natural sciences, so little does it lie in the concept of the ratio in itself. It is blinded not the least because it blocks itself off from qualitative moments as something which is for its part to be rationally thought."

"One can no longer paddle along in the mainstream, even the word sounds dreadful of modern philosophy. The recent kind, dominant until today, would like to expel the traditional moments of thought, dehistoricizing it according to its own content, assigning history to a particular branch of an established fact-collecting science. Ever since the fundament of all cognition was sought in the presumed immediacy of the subjectively given, there have been attempts, in thrall to the idol of the pure presence, as it were, to drive out the historical dimension of thought. The fictitious one-dimensional Now becomes the cognitive ground of inner meaning."

'Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainity and agitation distinquish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones ... All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned.' Marx

The essay sketches the changes to the visual or the image and the role of aesthetics in the culture of the postmodern and its celebratory affirmation of some post­ McLuhanite vision of culture transmogrified by computers and cyberspace.

In this world the very sphere of culture itself has expanded, becoming coterminous with market society in such a way that the cultural is no longer limited to its earlier, traditional or experimental forms, but is consumed throughout daily life itself, in shopping, in professional activities, in the various often televisual forms of leisure, in production for the market and in the consumption of those market products, indeed in the most secret folds and corners of the quotidian. Social space is now completely saturated with the culture of the image.

At the end of his essay Jameson makes some remarks on beauty in capitalism in postmodernity and a postmodern culture. He says:

it only seems appropriate in the present context to recall beauty's subversive role in a society marred by nascent commodification. The fin de siecle, from Morris to Wilde, deployed beauty as a political weapon against a compla­cent materialist Victorian bourgeois society and dramatized its negative power as what rebukes commerce and money, and what generates a longing for personal and social transformation in the heart of an ugly industrial society. Why then can we not allow for similar genuinely proto-political functions today, and at least leave the door open for an equally subversive deploy­ment of the kinds of beauty and art-religions I have been enumerating?

It is a question that allows us to measure the immense distance between the situation of modernism and that of the postmoderns (or ourselves), and between tendential and incomplete commodification and that on a global scale, in which the last remaining enclaves - the Unconscious and Nature, or cultural and aesthetic production and agriculture - have now been assimilated into commodity production.

Jameson continues:

In a previous era, art was a realm beyond commodification, in which a certain freedom was still available; in late modernism, inAdorno and Horkheimer's Culture Industry essay, there were still zones of art exempt from the commodifications of commer­ cial culture (for them, essentially Hollywood). Surely what characterizes postmodernity in the cultural area is the superses­ sion of everything outside of commercial culture, its absorption of all forms of art high and low, along with image production itself.

The image is the commodity today, and that is why it is vain to expect a negation of the logic of commodity production from it, that is why, finally, all beauty today is meretricious and the appeal to it by contemporary pseudo-aestheticism IS an ideological manoeuvre and not a creative resource.